Nvidia shows off Logan chip at Siggraph

CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has shown off a working Logan chip at this year's Siggraph conference and announced that it will support the full OpenGL 4.4 and DirectX 11 standards.

Nvidia first mentioned its Logan chip at its GPU Technology Conference in March, saying that it will be the first Tegra chip based on the firm's Kepler architecture and will support the firm's CUDA GPGPU programming language. Now the firm has shown off a working Logan chip at the Siggraph conference and said that it will support not only OpenGL ES 3 but the full OpenGL 4.4 and DirectX 11 standards.

While Nvidia didn't reveal details such as core counts, the firm did provide some more details on what Logan's GPU can do, including support for tessellation, deferred rendering and the ability to simulate physics. The firm didn't miss an opportunity to say that the Logan chip will support CUDA but there was no word on whether the chip will also support OpenCL. While it is unlikely that Nvidia will leave out support for OpenCL, instead the firm will merely not advertise it.

According to Nvidia, Logan samples have been in the firm's labs for a few weeks. The company bombastically and perhaps unrealistically claimed that Logan "will advance the capability of mobile graphics by over seven years", a claim that it didn't support with any performance figures.

Instead Nvidia showed a couple of demonstration videos that it said were powered by its Logan chip. The firm's Logan chip undoubtedly will be an impressive GPU that achieves the jump from the cut-down OpenGL ES standard to the full OpenGL standard, but the question will be whether it can entice tablet vendors to use it in showcase devices. µ